


stars near the lovely moon cover their own bright faces

by anxiousAnarchist



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Deviates From Canon, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5070139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiousAnarchist/pseuds/anxiousAnarchist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The moon, the stars, and orbital mechanics: eventually everything comes back around. Or: Strangelove and The Boss and what they did during Project Mercury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stars near the lovely moon cover their own bright faces

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uumuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/gifts).



> Massive thanks to [Lara](http://asokkalypsenow.tumblr.com)/[asokkalypsenow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/asokkalypsenow) (my Metal Gear partner-in-crime)for checking everything over, serving as a scientific advisor, and explaining how you turn around in space. Massive thanks to you for giving me an excuse to write Strangelove/Boss. Massive thanks to the MGS Wiki for fueling my desire to write more fanfic every time I go to Strangelove's page and see "though Strangelove came to love The Boss in the course of their cooperation, their association never progressed to anything beyond a one-sided relationship" because _please._

You notice each other right away. 

How could you not? 

\--

Dr. Strangelove is -- they haven’t invented words for what that woman is yet, but what she is is _unexpected,_ in the best possible way. Strangelove meets your eyes across the control room that first day at Project Mercury, after the successful return of the Mercury-Redstone 2, after you told the celebrating scientists that the joy of their work would soon turn sour, and she smiles with a sort of wry delight that intrigues you. You hadn’t expected to see many women here -- there are a few, of course, it would be impossible to run an operation on this scale without some women being involved, though mostly they’ve been relegated to less important teams than the one you’re to work with directly. But there she is, wearing what looks like a man’s clothes, of all things. Pale as the moon, and young, and she nods at you from amidst her male colleagues. A nod of recognition, though she’s never met you before, but you understand, because in a way you feel as though you have met. 

You can feel her watching you the whole time you’re walking about, talking to the engineers, getting a feel for everything. While you were asked to work on Project Mercury because of your expertise, this is still by no means your speciality. Science is certainly not an area you’re naturally gifted in. But you’ve pushed yourself to grasp more foreign subjects in tighter timeframes before. 

You can still feel the young woman watching you. She’s wearing sunglasses indoors, so you can’t quite see her eyes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell. 

The room’s full of chattering scientists, fresh off the high of a successful flight, still standing around in mission control cheering at each other. You make the rounds, look over all the instruments, try to impress upon the people that yes, the work starts now. Yes, while you’re still receiving the data from the flight.

The woman stands on the edge of a little half circle of men, who all seem excited as well, but she’s frowning down at some print outs. 

You introduce yourself to the group, shake hands all around (“Dr. Strangelove,” she says, except she doesn’t call herself that, not yet), the men tell you they’re looking over an issue they had with the launch abort system. 

“I thought the mission was a success,” you say. 

“It was!” says one of the men. “Oh, certainly. But you know, hah, minor issues here and there, not everything went exactly as we planned. . .”

“He’s underselling it,” says Dr. Strangelove. She taps the paper. “We were trying to slow down the descent of the capsule, but the launch abort system malfunctioned and the capsule went down much faster than we intended. We made an error somewhere.” 

“Why would the launch abort system malfunctioning affect the speed of the descent?” you ask. 

“You see --” says one of the engineers.

“I didn’t ask you,” you say. “Dr. Strangelove?” 

She smiles a little. When she talks, she’s expressive, expansive -- someone attempts to interrupt her at one point and she just bowls over them. It’s a good explanation, too: succinct, free of jargon and condescension. You nod, you thank her, you move on. 

She watches you, and you watch her back.

\--

You gravitate towards each other naturally. Strangelove is a long sigh of relief, a moment of silence in the middle of the storm. “Oh, thank goodness, another woman,” she says, after you’ve gone through and made your introductions. “Er, I mean --” 

“No,” you say. “I thought the same thing. It’s refreshing.” Really you were thinking -- oh, thank God, someone to interact with who doesn’t know your past, who doesn’t know you from your past. Someone who isn’t wrapped up in the shadow world of enemies turned allies and allies enemies, who won’t ever face you on the battlefield. 

She smiles. “Quite.” 

\-- 

“I need you to explain to me the basics of the science behind this mission,” you say to her the next day. “You seemed to be able to without undue condescension, and I’d rather not be babied through the process.” 

“Oh!” she says. “Alright. I mean, I understand the software much better than some of the other mechanics, but it’s pretty necessary to grasp those as well, so you can --” she laughs nervously “-- make sure you tell the computer the right things to do.” 

You sit down, and gesture to the chalkboard that covers one wall, as if to say “Go on, then.” You feel maybe a little guilty, you might be putting her out, and you’re certainly taking up a good deal of her time, but you haven’t earned anyone’s respect yet, and she’s proven her competence, her willingness. She was certainly happy to see another woman, maybe she won’t object to spending a little more time around one. 

She starts by explaining the mechanics of the sort of flight Project Mercury wants to achieve, how some flights are ballistic suborbital flights, how eventually they intend to have manned orbital flights, the differences between the two. She explains how a ship, once it’s in orbit, will stay there forever (“Or, nearly forever, or too long in any case, sometimes a week sometimes a year, depending on how stable it is, I’m simplifying”) so once you get up there the trouble is kicking yourself back out of orbit. 

“To go lower, to remove the ship from orbit, you have to fire the rockets in the opposite direction from the one you’re headed.” She draws on the chalkboard with sure bold strokes. “Say you’re headed right -- to go faster, you fire your rockets, but to go slower, you have to fire the rockets _retrograde_ \--” (another sweeping line drawn with the chalk) “-- _behind_ you. You’re going right, you’re firing the rockets right, that makes things speed up. You’re going right, you’re firing the rockets left, that makes things slow down.”

You listen to her for a few more minutes, explaining different sorts of rockets and different terminology, before you have to interrupt her, because you’ve been trying to answer a question for yourself for minutes but you still can’t figure out the solution. “Dr. Strangelove?”

“Hmm? Sorry, am I going too fast?”

“No, no, you’re fine,” you say. “But I’m a little confused on one thing.”

She dusts some chalk off her hands. “What’s that?”

“How do you --” you feel a little foolish asking this, but “-- how do you turn the ship around? How do you fire rockets backwards, if you don’t have that sort of control over the ship?” 

“Oh!” she says, and laughs. “Sorry, I’m not laughing at you, I just forget . . . you’re used to driving cars and planes and things like that.” 

“Yes,” you say. 

“ _Well,_ on Earth, there’s friction, of course, and resistance. You have to fight against air resistance to turn a plane, you have to steer to turn a car. But there’s no friction or gravity in space, so you just turn it around.” 

“You just turn it around?”

“You flip it,” she says, smiling. “We use reaction jets, small thrusters attached at various points on the capsule that can control the yaw, the pitch, or the roll -- which direction the capsule is facing, essentially. There’s no resistance, so you can just flip the whole rocket so it’s facing the other direction using jets that aren’t very powerful. But, because, you know, every object in a state of motion tends to _remain_ in that state of motion unless external force is applied, even though you’ve flipped the rocket entirely, the rocket is still traveling in the same direction. You’re moving right, but the nose of your craft is facing left.” 

You think about it for a second. “That’s counter intuitive but also . . .”

“Also, it’s so simple that it’s silly, I know,” she says. “Sorry, I haven’t explained this to anyone in a while.”

“You’re doing just fine,” you say. 

“It really is silly,” she says, back turned towards you, erasing a few lines from the board, “That it’s all just about how you’re falling. Orbiting is just falling so fast you miss the earth entirely. And to get back, you just have to flip it all turnways.” 

“But eventually, any ship will deorbit.” 

She shrugs. “Everything falls out of orbit eventually. Someday, even the moon will.” 

\--

Her explanations take hours, but she’s patient with you. It runs late into the night, and you find yourself offering to travel back to her apartment with her. It’s a long drive, and you’ve both secured housing in the same apartment complex, so you might as well, you rationalize. 

If you’re being more honest with yourself, it’s that you’ve quickly grown to like how her face lights up when she’s describing a particularly complex idea, the quick flashes of her smile that she tries to tamp down into a more serious expression. You’re trying to understand what drives her, what animates that spark in her eye, and so you ask over and over how this works or how that functions so you can see that excitement bloom fresh again and again. She grows shier sometimes, adjusts her glasses, laughs and says things like “oh, I’ve been talking too much,” but you could and will listen for as long as she cares to keep talking. 

“Tell me about yourself,” she says at one point, after an explanation of orbital mechanics dovetailed into an anecdote about her time at CalTech. 

You think of war and mud and twenty years of endless combat. “I’d rather hear about you.” 

\--

You end up wandering back to her apartment, almost by accident. She lets you in, and you keep talking. She makes tea, and pulls out one of her books so she can show you a diagram of a particularly difficult subject, and you keep talking. 

You walk around her apartment while she’s giving one explanation, hands in your pockets, observing. There’s a record player in the corner, bookshelves cover the walls, and they look to be piled haphazardly but you see that they’re alphabetical -- by subject too, you think. There’s a vest draped over an armchair, a pile of socks on the floor, three mugs on a table next to the couch. All the curtains are heavy. Papers are stacked everywhere, functional block diagrams and calculations and drawings of different parts of capsule. 

There’s a novel lying on the kitchen table, _Strange Friends_ , an illustration of two women sitting, turned towards one another, the short haired brunette woman staring at the blonde. “Theirs was a love that defied society!” proclaims the cover, presumably about the women, and you can sort of guess the contents from there. Strangelove sees you pick it up. 

You raise an eyebrow. 

“Oh,” says Strangelove, and she stands stock still, shoulders raised and head hunched, holding onto a book so hard her knuckles turn white. And then, sheepishly, “That won’t be a problem, will it?” 

“No, no,” you say. “It’s not a problem. Now, explain to me again how the Redstone rocket is different from the Atlas-D?” 

“Well,” she says, “First of all, the Redstone isn’t suited to orbital flight ---” and she’s off. 

\--

Strangelove’s more careful around you after that. Her posture stiffens, her voice grows more clipped and precise, and you watch her slip more formal, more embarrassed if your hands accidentally collide while she’s passing you something. This goes on for days, and you’d hoped that she’d understand that it really wasn’t an issue -- was so far from being an issue that it was a delight -- quicker, but as brilliant as she is, you’re starting to think there are some areas that Strangelove remains eternally clueless about. 

You have to go to Houston for a few days, your first meeting with the Mercury Seven, and when you come back Strangelove’s let herself drift even further, and something frantic claws at you. Because she was something -- something almost familiar, like a memory you hadn’t had yet. Something quiet and good, and now she’s drawing away because she doesn’t realize that for every time you catch her looking at you there’s a time you look _back._

But -- you lay out conversation topics she can’t resist, you ask her to explain, and explain again. And it’s already a bit of a habit, to climb into a car together and travel back to the apartments and walk to her door and sit inside and drink tea, and you let everything ride that routine. Strangelove pauses for a second when she’s unlocking the door, but she lets you inside anyway. 

She chatters nervously about the work she was doing the past few days, sits down and starts sorting through some papers. You start making tea, because you want some and she’s busy thinking and you know where everything is in her kitchen, which gives you a quiet thrill. 

There’s another one of her novels on the kitchen counter, _Spring Fire._ These two young ladies have “a story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly written,” and you chuckle. Strangelove looks up, and sees what you’re looking at, gets that deer in the headlights expression. 

“I -- I’m sorry,” she says, standing up abruptly, striding over to the bookshelf, trying to find a spot to cram the book in. “I really am sorry, I shouldn’t --” 

You get up and walk over to her. She’s tense, like a branch about to snap, and her back is turned towards you. “Strangelove,” you say. 

“What?” she says, except it comes out a little squeakier than you think she meant it to. 

“Strangelove, will you look at me for a second, please?” 

She turns around. 

“What is it?” she asks, but she -- she must _know,_ right? She must -- you, for once, experience a terrible second doubt: what if you were wrong, and she doesn’t want you like you hope she does? 

Well. Who dares, wins, after all. “Can I take your glasses off for a minute?”

“Sure?” she says. 

You slip them off her face, so that they’re perched on top of her head, and she looks so scared, and so -- she’s not much shorter than you, but she looks smaller, in that moment, and you wish you could cover her entirely, shield her. You like her glasses, really you do, they’re just a little too big for her face and it throws everything off kilter in a way you find charming, but you’d rather not worry about them, so you set them on a nearby table. You’re stalling. Who dares, who dares, come on. Mostly Strangelove just looks confused at the moment. This is not the part where you should be losing your nerve -- you stormed the beaches of Normandy nine months pregnant, you gave birth in the middle of a battle, how hard can it be to kiss one young woman? Especially a woman who’s been -- but no, even if you’re overwhelmingly sure she’s attracted to other women (and it would be hard not to be overwhelmingly sure), she could be seeking out your company merely because she really was that relieved to have another woman around. There’s no guarantee that --

“Is something wrong?” she asks. “You’re starting to make me a little nervous.” 

“No, no,” you say. “I just don’t know how --” You don’t know how to start. You don’t know where to start. But, then again, you do, you do. You kiss her, because how could you not? Just for an instant, you think, but it’s a long perfect second. 

“I really don’t mind,” you say. 

“Oh,” she says. There’s a tense moment, like the second before a rubber band snaps back. And then -- “What?” 

You smooth a piece of hair behind her ear, let your thumb linger on her cheekbone. You’re close enough that your foreheads are touching. “You’re a clever woman. Think about it.” 

Her face is red, and she looks into your eyes for a silent eternity, like she’s trying to solve a problem but she’s been given the wrong data set. There’s this flicker of a moment, where you’re not sure . . . you’re not sure if you read the situation right. “Oh,” she says, eventually. 

“Yeah,” you say. The doubt gnaws at you again. After all, you’re older and your face wears it, you know that. You’re loud and rough and a little too serious and a little too calculating. “I’m sorry, I can stop if you want me to.” 

She catches your hand before you can withdraw it. “No!” she says. “No. I, uh, I --” She hesitates for a second, and kisses you, wonderingly, as if she’s checking to make sure she can, and then she looks away. You can see her face trying to settle itself back into a blank slate but she’s so easy to read, always, she’s so expressive even when she thinks she isn’t, and you love that. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she says. “Boss --” 

“Joy,” you say. It’s been so long. “Call me Joy.” 

Strangelove smiles a little tiny fraction of a smile, and you kiss the corner of her mouth. “Joy it is,” she says. 

\--

Later, after you’re somewhat decent, you sit by the window with her as she fiddles with a little telescope. 

“Do you check them every night?” you ask. “You know, they’ll still be there. They haven’t moved.” 

“That’s the point,” she says. “They’re a constant. Every time I look at the sky, the same stars are there.” 

Strangelove’s got a faraway look in her eye, and you’re filled with this tender sort of longing. You are relentless, you always push forward, you never look back. But for once, you wish you could put that all on pause. 

“Of course, that’s not entirely accurate,” she hastens to add. “Stars change position in the sky, and naturally, if you were to observe, say, the stars over England or over India, they’d look somewhat different.”

“I understand,” you say. 

"You know I won't be here for long," you say, touching her shoulder gently, trying to soften the blow.

"I'm not a fool," she says. She won't look at you, instead fusses over the telescope some more. "That's the nature of -- of --" she gestures to you, to herself, to the stars. "But I don't intend to let that stop me from enjoying what time there is. Er, if you'd like, that is."

"I would like," you say. "I would like that very much." 

\--

You work and work, all day, sometimes into the night, and then you steal away to Strangelove's apartment (never your own, she doesn't ask and you don't offer) and kiss her with the curtains drawn. She looks amazed each time. You read her romance novels aloud, and she looks duly embarrassed during the more _interesting_ bits and laughs at every peculiar turn of phrase. She explains vast concepts to you, her hands sketching equations in the air, until she grows frustrated and sits up, digs a pencil and paper out of a drawer, draws diagrams and writes equations, naked shoulders hunched. 

\--

“They’ve started calling me the missus when they think I can’t hear them,” she says to you one night while she sits at the table, copying something down.

“The missus?”

“You know.” She pitches her voice lower, imitating -- you recognize -- one of the other engineers. “Here comes Mrs. Boss, boys, better straighten up or she’ll tell Mom on you. Also, they’ve taken to calling you Mom.” 

You laugh. “Oh? Well, I suppose I should’ve expected the Mom part. Does it bother you?”

Strangelove smiles in a wistful secret way, doesn’t look up from the paper. “No. I actually . . . I actually kind of like it. Is that wrong?” 

“It’s sweet,” you say. 

“You’re sweet,” she says.

You laugh again. You’re doing that a lot. Strangelove brings out something in you that makes it, inch by inch, easier. “Tell that to anyone I’ve worked with in the past twenty years.” 

She shrugs. “So you expect people to do their best. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

“I made a colonel cry once,” you say, thinking back to the forties. You, twenty-three years old and terrifyingly pregnant, pacing back and forth, hurling insults at this man until he burst into tears. You shouldn’t be proud of that, but you are, just a little.

“I wish you’d make some of the directors cry,” she says. “Tell them we need more funding. Tell them we need more _time._ ” 

“I might just at that,” you say. “We have the funding we’ve got, though, you know that. And we have the time we’ve got. And it’s not enough, but it’s what we have, and we work with it.”

“I know,” she says, softer, and she’s not thinking about rockets anymore you’re pretty sure.

“Hey,” you say, leaning on the table. You place a hand on hers, stop her from writing so she’ll look up at you. “We have what we have, and it’ll never be enough but --” you wish your voice sounded a little less plaintive, it’s harder to keep things hidden around Strangelove than it is around spies and foreign dignitaries and generals and presidents “-- but what we have is good, isn’t it?” 

She kisses the palm of your hand, places it on her cheek. “It’s extraordinary.” 

\--

You dance around the fact you’re going to space, the fact it’s dangerous. You know she hates it, you know Strangelove doesn’t quite understand why you have to (why, to be honest, you _want_ to, despite the danger -- danger never bothered you) and you know she’s fighting the decision. But you leave that outside of your private moments. Sometimes at night in the dark she’ll whisper “don’t go” and you’ll whisper apologies against her skin. 

\-- 

The launch of the Mercury Redstone BD isn’t anything but an unmanned test flight, but it’s only three weeks before your own flight is scheduled. You know Strangelove’s fretting, that she’ll fret more if the test isn’t successful. If this flight has the same issues that the MR-2 did, if it falls too fast, you’re not sure she won’t resort to physically holding you down.

“At least the problem wasn’t anything on my end,” she says, sitting next to you in the viewing area, gazing down at the command post. “Just malfunctions with the actual mechanical parts, not the computer.” Someone nearby rolls his eyes, Strangelove’s been giving this speech a lot. 

“We’ll see if everything holds up as well on this flight,” she adds, fussing with the cuffs of her sleeves. “I checked and I double checked, but there’s always room for error.” 

You place a hand on her wrist for just a second to calm her down. Strangelove sighs and folds her hands, tries to stop fidgeting. You were this close to giving her a reason to not watch the launch at all, but she _should_ be there to observe the launch, your last test run, and anyway she probably wouldn’t listen to you. 

“There’s always something that can be done better,” you say, thinking of all the times you’d been tempted to celebrate minor victories when a whole war lay ahead of you. “And there is no such thing as absolute certainty. A new problem could come up, the whole launch could fail -- but if it does, we’ll start over.” 

“Thanks Mom,” says someone in the row behind you, but you hush them, and you and Strangelove sit in silence as they go through the launch status check. 

“Remember to breathe,” you say, when the rocket launches. 

She doesn’t, mostly, so it’s good that the flight’s relatively short, less than nine minutes -- and, as far as you can tell, there’s not a single problem.

Strangelove nudges you with her elbow. “That was a little exciting, wasn’t it?” 

“I’ve seen better,” you say, but you’re relieved, and you’re relieved that she’s relieved, and while you remain stony-faced as ever as you go down to the command post to talk to the flight director about how everything went, you wink at her. 

\--

Strangelove is -- when you push her she pushes back. She’s soft, but she’s hard as steel, unflinching, unyielding. 

“You really should stop smoking those, you know,” she says, nodding at the cigar in your hand. 

Strangelove wrinkles her nose every time you light one, sometimes makes a fuss about coughing pointedly, mentioning how she can’t exactly open windows what with the sun and all, mutters something about air raids. 

“Mmhmm,” you say. 

She gets up from her seat, plucks the cigar from your hand and stubs it out. “Surely there are more interesting things you could be doing with your mouth,” she says. 

“What did you have in mind?” you ask.

Strangelove looks startled, as if she’s just realized what she said. “Oh! Er. . .” 

“I’m only teasing,” you say. “But -- if it bothers you that much, I’ll stop. For now.” 

“For now,” she says, leaning down to kiss you. You pull her into your lap, and she fiddles with the collar of your shirt. “In the meantime, I’ll try to keep you busy for a little while.” 

\--

Strangelove stands in the Vehicle Assembly Building a few days before your flight, the light streaming down on her, staring up at the Redstone rocket like she does every time she sees it, as if the bigness of the idea is just now hitting her -- us, in space. Us, up there in the dark expanse, out to learn whatever knowledge, however terrible, however wonderful, waits for us there. And we’re building the thing that’ll take us to the stars with our own hands.

Whenever Strangelove leaves the building during the day she has to cover herself entirely, until she’s dwarfed by her gloves, her coat, how the hood of the coat hangs over her face, casting it in shadow. Standing there, looking up and up and up at the Atlas, you think you grasp for a second the emotion behind her drive to succeed. It’s not just a mission for her, not just an order from someone higher up. Project Mercury’s something closer to her ideology, and in the same way she’s tiny in the VAB with the giant hulking rocket slowly being frankensteined together over her head, humanity is tiny when faced with the vastness of space. 

You don’t understand till later what you see then, not until you’ve seen the same thing written out across the sky as you stare down at the Earth. 

(“Not down,” chides the Strangelove in your head, “You can’t look _down_ at Earth, there’s no _down_ in space, you _must_ stop describing things that way or you’ll never get your head around the issue at hand.") 

You realize then that the way you looked at the planet (as a puzzle with a piece missing, as a chessboard, as a card game where everyone’s cheating) didn’t correspond with the reality of the thing. The same as there’s no up or down in the cold vacuum that surrounds your tiny capsule, there’s no us, there’s no them. You can’t see borders from space, because they aren’t real. 

Here, in the present, you walk over to her, so you can feel small alongside her. You expect her to ask you to not go, like she does in the still silence of your shared bed, but Strangelove is always surprising you in little ways. “Come back?” she asks.

“I’ll try,” you say. “I’ll try.” 

\--

You don’t wait for your superiors to assign you to your next mission. Instead, you don’t as much ask as _tell_ them why it’s vital you stay on with NASA, hint at some other knowledge of Soviet advances, point at the ways the space program already, while you were lying in a hospital somewhere, invigorated the Soviet people, inspired Americans. 

You’re convincing. You know you are. You wouldn’t have been able to pull the Cobra Unit together, would never have been able to sell anyone on the idea of a unit made up of some twenty somethings and an octogenarian doing covert operations that involved shaking down ghosts for information unless you were deadly convincing. You turn it into their idea, make sure they know how brilliant everyone will think they are. After all, she’s expendable, we don’t need her out on the battlefield that much, especially after she’s sustained _another_ injury of that magnitude, and she does have the experience -- who better to help the program than the pilot of that first failed burningly triumphant flight? 

\--

Stars don’t have fixed positions, but they return to their places eventually. The moon leaves the sky, but it always comes back again. 

“Space is too dangerous, that flight was a disaster, it’s too risky --”

“So we fix it,” you say. “Together.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let’s be real here: Strangelove totally read a lot of lesbian pulps during their heyday. The books The Boss sees in her apartment are real ones: _Strange Friends_ is by Agnete Holk and was originally published in 1955, and I selected it entirely based on the “strange” part. [Here’s the cover.](http://www.strangesisters.com/a-z/images/xstrangefriends.jpg) The second novel, _Spring Fire_ by Vin Packer (the pseudonym of Marijane Meaker) was originally published in 1952 and is considered one of the first lesbian pulps. [Here’s the cover The Boss saw for that one.](http://www.strangesisters.com/a-z/images/xspringfire.jpg) I will say that looking at covers of lesbian pulps is a Good Time, but while the two I’ve linked are SFW, if you go on to look at the whole gallery on that site many (MANY) of them will not be. 
> 
> There weren’t, as far as I can tell, any women engineers who worked at Cape Canaveral/what’s now the Kennedy Space Center during the Project Mercury days, though there might have been some miscellaneous mathematicians/assistants/etc. The first woman engineer who worked at the Kennedy Space Center was, I'm pretty sure, [JoAnn H. Morgan.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JoAnn_H._Morgan)
> 
> [Here's](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Mercury_Control.jpg) what the Mercury Control Center looked like, it's absurdly low tech. [Here's](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Mercury_Spacecraft.png) a diagram of the actual capsule that the astronaut would sit in, it's absurdly small. [Here's](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/vab_crane_vertical.jpg) the Vehicle Assembly Building, it's absurdly tall. ETA: I shoulda Fact Checked this earlier, but the VAB as it stands now (largest one story building in the world, entirely too massive, etc) wasn't fully constructed and operational until 1966 -- just assume that in the Metal Gear World they built it a little earlier, because why not. 
> 
> If you have the time/inclination, I suggest reading pretty much absolutely everything about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, as the astronauts got up to a lot more bullshit than you would think. The list of things they managed to smuggle onto spaceships is pretty long and definitely interesting.


End file.
